HardHouse Raver – A film by David Hilberink

HardHouse Raver – Ode to Hardhouse.

When I was introduced to hardhouse as a teenager I was immediately in love with it. The energy, the sounds, I just loved it. Along the years my friends and myself visited many, many events where I was upfront the dj box to watch the hardhouse artists from as close as I could be. Almost as a groupie.

When hardhouse had a dip around 2004, there weren’t many events hosted in the Netherlands. The HQ events in the Melkweg Amsterdam were nearly the only ones who kept hardhouse alive. To be honest, we were also attending less hardhouse events and I lost the scene a bit. In March 2015 HQ hosted an evening with Tom Harding, JP and BK. I noticed it at the day of the event on Facebook and as HQ is always sold out, we were too late getting tickets so we weren’t there. Because I wasn’t there I wandered how the event was and how the artists played over there, but more importantly, what they did over the last years, are they still into hardhouse and more questions raised. That gave me the idea for the documentary and i started writing a plan for the film.

We got in contact with some artists, most of them wanted to join, some of them didn’t. I have to say that in preparation of a production day the artists and promoters were really helpful. There was no budget for the film, so we knew we had to do a crowdfunding campaign.
We used the crowdfunding campaign as a marketing tool and to try to fund the documentary of course. The marketing part went really well The crowdfunding campaign film was being watched almost 42.000 times, shared over 400 times, over a hundred replies, so something was definitely happening.

It was pretty disappointing that we did not even came close to our 8.000 euro goal to fund the film. How did we managed to finish the film? Well most of the production days before the crowdfunding campaign were spread out over a ¾ year so we already paid for it ourselves without having to much damage in our wallet. Unfortunately because we didn’t made our goal we had to skip some events. We got offered some funding from music labels, but we wanted to keep it (musically) independent. Because we adjusted our film plans the film was made costing much less then 8000 euros. And with Drunkmunkyshoes we did found a great sponsor, however the biggest part we paid ourselves. It’s not the right way to fund a film, but we already had a lot of footage and I certainly wanted to finish what we started. It was definitely worth it and I think we still did make a great ode to hardhouse.

We got a lot of requests from people who asked if we could mention a specific artist or event that was important to them or to hardhouse. When making a 45 minute documentary or actually in any film, it’s impossible to mention all events, artists, labels and promoters, so we didn’t focused at that point. We also didn’t wanted to show people dancing and partying for 45 minutes, so we tried to get some dept in it and with some educational hardhouse topics mentioned.

We really enjoyed making it, although sometimes it was really tough. Because we all worked at the film next to our daily jobs, voluntarily, there were moments that we wanted to split ourselves in 2. Or 3 when a little boy was born during production days! However, we are really happy with the final result and hopefully you will enjoy Hardhouse Raver just as much as we did making it!